Get out the vote: JAX London Innovation Awards 2017 voting has started!

Voting has started for the JAX London Innovation Awards! Let’s take a closer look at this year’s slate of candidates for the most innovative contributions to Java, Software Delivery, and DevOps.

It’s time to vote for the JAX London Innovation Awards. You nominated and we listened! This year, we have a whopping 36 candidates to choose from. They’re all amazing in their own way!

Voting runs from August 22 – September 15. Winners will be announced on October 10th at JAX London, our four-day conference for cutting-edge software engineers and enterprise-level professionals. JAX brings together the world’s leading innovators in the fields of JAVA, microservices, continuous delivery and DevOps. Get your tickets now, our Early Bird sale is going fast!

Let’s take a closer look at our candidates, shall we? In no particular order, we present:

Most innovative contribution to the Java ecosystem:

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources required by that code.

Graal ProjectThe aim of the Graal project is to expose VM functionality via Java APIs and make it feasible to write in Java a dynamic compiler and interpreter for a language runtime. These components will seamlessly integrate and leverage existing VM infrastructure (e.g., HotSpot).

The Spring Framework provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications — on any kind of deployment platform. Spring focuses on the “plumbing” of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers, providing programming language-specific features from the language server to the client. The goal of the protocol is to allow programming language support to be decoupled from any given editor or IDE and even have it distributed over independent language servers.

JHipster (for Java Hipster) is a development platform to generate, develop and deploy Spring Boot (that’s the Java part) and Angular (that’s the hipster part) web applications and Spring microservices. It is open source and based on Yeoman.

The MicroProfile is a baseline platform definition that optimizes Enterprise Java for a microservices architecture and delivers application portability across multiple MicroProfile runtimes. The initially planned baseline is JAX-RS + CDI + JSON-P, with the intent of community having an active role in the MicroProfile definition and roadmap.

Vavr core is a functional library for Java 8+. It helps to reduce the amount of code and to increase the robustness. A first step towards functional programming is to start thinking in immutable values. Vavr provides immutable collections and the necessary functions and control structures to operate on these values.

Jigsaw is the main feature for the new Java version 9. It implements a standard module system for the Java SE Platform and applies that system to the Platform itself, and to the JDK. The primary goals are to make the JDK more easily scalable down to small computing devices, to improve the security and maintainability of Java SE Platform and to make it easier for developers to construct and maintain libraries and large applications.

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser. It reduces the amount of boilerplate code you need to write and leverages existing frameworks and libraries of the JVM with 100% Java interoperability.

Deeplearning4j (DL4J) is the first commercial-grade, open-source, distributed deep-learning library written for Java and Scala. Integrated with Hadoop and Spark, DL4J is designed to be used in business environments on distributed GPUs and CPUs.

Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab, the Spark codebase was later donated to the Apache Software Foundation, which has maintained it since.

Most innovative solution to Software Delivery & DevOps:

Atomist brings the development flow into Slack and correlates activities so that developers have a consistent view of how their code moves from commit to production. Developers can see commits, issues, and PRs in Slack, and comment on an issue, merge a PR or create a release without changing tools.

JFrog DevOps Tools
JFrog Artifactory, the Universal Artifact Repository, JFrog Bintray, the Universal Distribution Platform, JFrog Mission Control, for Universal Repository Management, and JFrog Xray, Universal Artifact Analysis, are used by millions of developers and DevOps engineers around the world and available as open-source, on-premise and SaaS cloud solutions.

ElectricFlow
ElectricFlow offers one unified platform which allows teams of all sizes to automate deployments and coordinate releases, everywhere.

CollabNet DevOps Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is a platform designed exclusively for providing a single pane of glass, dashboard, and traceability views across your DevOps toolchain and processes from planning to operations and that can be traced back to planning and development.

The long term goal for the OMR project is to foster an open ecosystem of language runtime developers to collaborate and collectively innovate with hardware platform designers, operating system developers, as well as tool and framework developers and to provide a robust runtime technology platform so that language implementers can much more quickly and easily create more fully featured languages to enrich the options available to programmers.

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances.

Metercloud.io provides an integration engine combining the strength of traditional historical data mining with forecasting based on predictive analytics and “nowcasting” based on realtime stream processing. Metercloud.io provides both the technical integration infrastructure (iPaaS, integration Platform as a Service) and ready-to-use business integration applications (OaaS, Orchestration as a Service) for the industrial Internet-of-Things.

Boxfuse
Boxfuse is the easiest, most reliable and secure way to run your JVM, Node.js and Go apps on AWS. Boxfuse fuses a Payload, like a Spring Boot Executable Jar, Tomcat War file or Node.js tgz together with the required Components, like Tomcat, OpenJDK or Node.js into an Image. Boxfuse then runs this Image unchanged on all environments.

Go is a free and open source programming language created at Google in 2007. It is a compiled, statically typed language in the tradition of Algol and C, with garbage collection, limited structural typing, memory safety features and CSP-style concurrent programming features added.

Grafana is an open source metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus and InfluxDB. It is most commonly used for visualizing time series data for infrastructure and application analytics but many use it in other domains including industrial sensors, home automation, weather, and process control.

OpenShift.io provides an integrated approach to DevOps, including all the tools a team needs to analyze, plan, create and deploy services. OpenShift.io also has new features that provide a one-click Linux container environment for developers and a machine learning system that helps developers make better decisions. OpenShift.io is open source.

The Moby Project is a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement and help the ecosystem take containers mainstream. It provides a library of components, a framework for assembling them into custom container-based systems and a place for all container enthusiasts to experiment and exchange ideas.

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company. To emphasize this and clarify the project’s governance structure, Prometheus joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016 as the second hosted project after Kubernetes.

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve production infrastructure. It can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions. Terraform is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a lightweight, open governance structure (project), formed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, for the express purpose of creating open industry standards around container formats and runtime. The debut release of its container runtime and image format specifications is comprised of Runtime Specification v1.0 (a specification for defining the lifecycle of a container) and Image Format Specification v1.0 (a specification for the container image format).

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.